“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
~William Shakespeare
Happy July, friends of Biblioll College! And a very happy Jane Austen July to those who celebrate! (If you don’t know about this delightful tradition, check out Katie Lumsden’s recent video, where she describes her hosting of the event and her personal choices for Austenesque reading this year.)
Frankly, here in southern Oregon, “sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,” and several of us are already ticking the days down to the beginning of autumn.
Still...it is a time for crisp salads and plum-berry cobbler, with plums picked from the tree; for reading outside in the cool of the morning, or the not-quite-as-sweltering warmth of the evening; a time for visits from long-distance family members and late-evening outdoor chats with a friend; for fledgling birds and young raccoons; for morning glories and creamsicle-colored dahlias and powdery-blue larkspur; for making a first venture of the year into our Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan theatre, under the stars.
What are you looking forward to for the coming month? We hope you’re staying safe and cool and enjoying your holiday time.
June was our fifteenth full month of Dispatches from Biblioll College, and we want to express our heartfelt thanks to all of you, our fellow literature nerds and autodidacts…everyone who has been following, liking, commenting, or sharing our posts. Your support and comments are always enlightening, encouraging, and just so fun to read. Thank you for reading along with us.
This month, Boze reveled in poetry, from Omar Khayyam to Dante to our beloved Malcolm Guite—and the art that has inspired the former two. We’ve tested ourselves on vocabulary words that are not enough used. Dana’s book collection for her 2026 “Oxford Project” syllabus is growing. Rach shared her fifteen favorite audiobook narrators, grateful for the immense skill and art it takes to conjure up an author’s world.
Friendly reminder that, in August, we will resume our Great Books Challenge (with a wrap-up of Herodotus’s Histories before beginning Aristophanes’s The Clouds); Dispatches from Dickens with a thirteenth post in the series, focusing on Dickens in 1841 and concluding Volume II of The Letters of Charles Dickens; and the Classical Music History with six English and Irish composers: William Byrd, Thomas Morley, John Wilbye, Orlando Gibbons, John Bull, and John Dowland.
Of course, the Shadow Canon, Arts & Culture, and Dreaming Spires posts will continue this month as we share what we are reading and learning.
After a delightful if too-short visit from my Portland-based kids, and in the midst of doing battle with some (annoying, minor) health issues this month, I’ve dug deep into my “Oxford Project”. Tugging at the fascinating “threads” I mentioned, I’ve identified two or three that are especially “calling” to me. (More on that in my next post, but let me drop the teaser word “theodicy” and a phrase that seems to summarize Tolkien’s philosophy of history: “the Long Defeat”. We’ll see.)
As for my hefty TBR pile, I’ve read several Tolkien-related works by Holly Ordway, Dimitra Fimi, Michael Drout, et al, and the first part of Tim Hilton’s biography of John Ruskin--didn’t much care for the latter, to be honest, and have turned instead to Ruskin’s autobiographical Praeterita and E.P. Thompson’s bio of William Morris, From Romantic to Revolutionary. Plus a half dozen or so scholarly articles from JSTOR. Meanwhile (speaking of audiobooks), I’m also listening to Andy Serkis’s delightful reading of THE HOBBIT as I whack away at weeds and deadhead in the garden, or take walks.
“Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for everybody.”
~Mary Bennet, chapter 17, Pride and Prejudice
We just finished the ten-part series on Britbox, The Other Bennet Sister. Mary is center-stage in this imagined sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. We were captivated by the production--the story, the acting, the Austen-esque quality. In an interview, titular actor Ella Bruccoleri observed that the real appeal of the story is Mary’s coming to love herself. Yes, the romantic story is captivating; but Mary’s journey to discover and value herself is paramount. Hear, hear!
In the midst of wonderful reads, two experiences stood out for Rach in June: 1.) finishing Anthony Trollope’s Parliamentary (Palliser) novels on audiobook, read by Timothy West; and, 2.) finally reading the whole of Thomas Carlyle’s monumental history, The French Revolution. More on this, perhaps, in a separate post. She is also submerged in her rework of her modern-Gothic mystery, when she isn’t caregiving or doing sewing business-related tasks. And there is plenty of joy to be had in the daily things: the morning book and coffee before work; the evening Treasure Island storytime with her husband and brother; the adventures with her niece and her array of stuffies; gardening, walking, and—as ever—the YouTube rambles of John Rogers. For Jane Austen July, she’s reading The Other Bennet Sister and a biography of Jane by Lucy Worsley; possibly, too, a reread of Mansfield Park with Boze.
Boze had, as you can tell by the above photo, an exceptionally busy June. He read and reviewed, I think, ten books for his various jobs? The challenge was to also carve out time for study and the writing of fiction, but even here there was much joy to be found. Though he has been deeply discouraged by an essay saying the market for middle-grade books has collapsed, his latest essay for Plough (a review of Galahad and the Grail) was lauded by Malcolm Guite, which meant a great deal. We planned a Pride & Prejudice viewing party for a teenage friend who had never heard of Jane Austen, and now she’s a fan. While he finishes his murder-mystery-cum-time-travel yarn, Boze has been afflicted with ideas for about a dozen other projects and is eager to write a majestically eerie work of fantasy. Reading The Lore of the Land (an encyclopedic book about the folklore of England), Rosemary Sutcliff’s King Arthur Omnibus, Katherine Langrish’s From Spare Oom to Ward Robe (about Narnia) and Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Modern Reading, about the genre fiction that inspired Tolkien, has sent his imagination shambling off in some promising new directions (a young, female sleuth solving crimes in a 1930s-style country house that is full of magic?). Reading The Divine Comedy in various translations threatens to become an all-consuming obsession. He’s been pondering what Tolkien said about how “No one of us can really invent or ‘create’ in a void, we can only reconstruct and perhaps impress a personal pattern on ancestral material.” Now to figure out how that’s done…
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Thank you again for journeying with us, friends. We are so grateful for all of our subscribers and would love to hear your thoughts about what you are reading, watching, and learning, and what kind of content you would love to see here. Keep reading, learning, and creating. Happy July, and stay cool in the shade...with a good book.
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